How I Broke Her Heart: A Story of Internet Dating Gone Wrong
7 min readFree trial? Thousands of single Christian women who want to meet me? Can this be true? Risk-free romance! What have I got to lose?
A lot.
I had just recovered emotionally from my last relationship attempt and was feeling a bit hopeless. I’m not that barbaric, really, and can be fairly genteel when I’ve been fed and watered. Nevertheless, when I tried to get serious with this person, she gave me the “friends talk” and promptly moved 8000 miles away (insert Hindenburg crash reel). Fast forward a bit and I’ve moved on emotionally. Now, picture the scene: I was the only person my age at my church. I had no social life despite having lived in the town for all of my life. I was also working full time as a programmer, teaching part time as a martial arts instructor, and volunteering part time as a youth director. I certainly did not have time for romance, but I had the desire for it.
Working with dozens of teens as a youth director gave me children that I never had. Children at their best, that is – when they wanted to play games, study God’s word, rock out at concerts and jam together. It hit me that I really wanted children; that I was not born to be a bachelor, but a father. The proof was that I loved these kids like they were my own. The desire to be a father was strong, but so was the desire to be a husband. I thought that the world was filled with jerks and I couldn’t wait to show some lucky girl just how good it could be . . . to lavish her with chivalry and attention. I wanted a serious relationship for a lot of reasons – to be challenged, to have a running-mate, to have someone to counter my wild side, to have someone to talk to, give back rubs to, someone to receive my love and return it to me, and basically grow in my life. You don’t mature as a person by sitting at your Dell playing Diablo 2 three hours every night.
Learning how to love a woman is probably one of the most serious things we will face as men. All the concepts and truths we learn and are called to must be in our minds. You have to learn to communicate too, which can be painfully difficult at times. I communicate better with machines. There is no communication difficulty with God, as he speaks all languages. Women, I have found, do not speak your language, nor you theirs. All this difficulty is multiplied when you communicate by email. Email is a horrendous communication medium, and many would call me an email junkie.
Enough backstory, here’s the point – I joined this site on a free trial and then finally paid for a three-month subscription and started socializing. I emailed a lot of fine Christian girls who lived near me over the three months, usually just chatting to find out what they were like. Know how many responses I got? None. 90% percent of the girls on the site read my emails and then deleted them. The others deleted my mail without reading it at all.
I was upset. You can only get shot down a few dozen times before it gets to you. I had concluded this was a waste of my time. I cancelled my subscription. Three months later I got an offer to come back for a month of free time. My spam-hating side said “DELETED!!” but the hopeless romantic in me uttered the famous last words: “What have you got to lose?”
So I signed back up, filled out my profile in the most ridiculous way possible and let my comedic side shine. Gems such as the following graced my profile:
Question: How did your last relationship end? What did you learn?
Answer: I threw her off a cliff. I learned that girls don’t bounce.
This approach got me multiple interested emails – one girl who tried to pass herself off as a Gisele Bundchen look-alike with a faked picture, (sorry friend, but someone who looks like that doesn’t need a dating site) and one girl who had no picture. (Warning!) We got to talking. She was in the military, very tough-girl, but still feminine. Like me, she had become a Christian later in life and we clicked immediately. One email became half a dozen; then we went offsite and started emailing everyday. This continued for a month. I started thinking: if I can converse this easily with someone I don’t know at all, then who cares what she looks like, right? I’d rather be with an average-looking born-again warrior-princess than some cute goody-goody who doesn’t appreciate turbochargers and firearms, right? Then she sent me pictures of her. She was gorgeous.
At this point, I heard warning bells, but was ignoring them deafly. However, email frequency increased, occasional chats occurred, and then the unthinkable happened. My company forced me to take some time off and a friend out east invited me to his wedding, all in rapid succession. She didn’t live far from there and I asked her if we could meet and if she’d go with me to the wedding. She was thrilled, and I was thrilled that she was thrilled. It’s like some law of the cosmos preventing romance from working in my life had been repealed and suddenly things were fitting together.
So I drove out ten hours, we met and hung out for three days, went to the wedding, went to her church, and I even met her family. Although her brother gave me a stamp of approval, her parents were somewhat hostile. I was mostly confused and in a daze. Did I just really meet her? The first day I found it impossible to reconcile that she was the same person I’d been emailing. As if the mental image I had in my mind did not align with the reality – I had to look twice to see the face that I knew. After the second day I went back to my hotel and just laid there for an hour totally confused. What have I done? Is this wrong? Right? Do I like her as she is? Is she too different? What do you want me to do, God? The third day I spent entirely with her and her family and I got to see all kinds of interesting tension there that I hadn’t known as much about before. But when I looked in those green eyes, and she smiled at me, my worries went away. I’m a sucker for green eyes.
When I returned home we settled into what I would call a typical, long-distance relationship. Time on the phone, emails, cards on birthdays, etc. All the while, doubts grew in my mind. I didn’t have time for romance, nor did I have the ability to move with my ministry here. She was in the military, had other responsibilities, and thus we were stuck. Not that you should move, except for someone who you are committed to. I was not committed. I was in doubt. Many doubts added up in my mind and, ashamedly, I kept talking to her for three months before I knocked the straw man down, admitted my doubt to her, and called it off. She was crushed. I had never felt like such a bastard in my life. She made it easy for me, actually, but I still cried. What hurt was that I had tried to be the man I wanted to be and found I was not. I needed to fall on my face to realize that I was not as good as I thought I was. Pride is a black, black sin. Worse, she actually cared about me, and this was a new thing. No one had even given a rat’s ass for me before. I didn’t care for her nearly as much, but I still cared. I knew she was God’s daughter, and hurting God’s daughter is like hurting God. Even if I didn’t truly love her, I do truly love God, and I feel like God cried with us both that night.
Father, I’m sorry for how I treated your daughter. It wasn’t right, I wasn’t sensitive, and I wasn’t the committed loving man you called me to be. I didn’t count the cost before I launched into something to satisfy my own emotional needs, and it hurt someone – and I haven’t admitted the half of my failings in this article.
That was a long time ago now, and the story does have a happy ending. The mistakes I made taught me important truths about relationships that I’ve applied since then. Reread this paragraph several times out loud. Internet romance is not risk free, despite what the ads say, even at a Christian site. There is an emotional cost to both people and no part-time romance will work. Just because your personalities are compatible doesn’t mean that your lives are. Two good Christians does not automatically make a good Christian couple. Think and pray a lot more than I did, or you’re destined to fall too, maybe harder and hurt someone else worse in the process. I wish I could have been taught some of these things, or learned them the easy way instead of the hard way, but now things are reconciled. I will soon be married to someone so much more compatible, in life and in personality, in goals and in passions, that the shadows of the past recede in the bright light of today.
As to the mystery girl, I don’t know how the story ended for her, and I try not to think about it. I can only pray her situation became as simple and joyful as my own. If you would, pray for her to be filled with joy and forget the pain of the past as well.
